Is there anybody running metabase on AWS free tier (t2.micro) with reliable MySQL requests? I’m at the point where I need to decide if I will go from designing a full dashboard from scratch or use metabase but the running costs on a t2.small are 80 bucks per month.
So I have two questions:

Does it work with a t2.micro instance?

Can you ask Metabase to shut down when not used or to freeze? How do you reduce running speed?

Btw, Heroku seems free but seems to launch the metabase portal each time I go on the direct link.

Does it means that the Heroku server cannot run when I don’t access it? Pulses are thus not working?

If you’re able, the solution to the cost problem can be more involved than just running an instance 24/7.
AWS offers tools like auto-scaling groups/clusters, that can scale down to 0 active instances when appropriate…

In other words, when there’s no traffic, there are no servers. This has one major implication however - a new server must be spawned on first request. That takes a few minutes.
Work arounds to this include:

if your traffic is predictable, schedule your instance to shut-down when not in use (i.e. night-time).

use auto-scaling with ‘spot instances’. Spot instances are instances you ‘bid’ on. Typically, the costs of these are at least 50% of on-demand instances, but they can be terminated on short notice, and only last 6 hours max

using auto-scaling with a minimum 1 micro instance. This means the cluster will still respond, albeit a bit slowly on the first few requests. Once a small instance has fired up (as part of your auto-scaling configuration), your elastic load balancer can direct traffic to the small instance.

purchase a reserved instance for 1-3 years. Cost savings here are also significant.

Deploying applications on AWS in a cost-effective manner usually entails some infrastructure administration and automation.

Note, you should DYOR here - I’m recalling this off the top of my head.

Not exactly what you asked, but Metabase runs very well in a docker container on Google Kube Engine paired with a mysql cloud SQL repository. But don’t know if you can get away with just the f1-micro instances for your Kube cluster, though i expect that it might. So there might be some cost involved. But as hagen mentions above, cost can be managed by not running 24/7.

I just joined discourse to ask if anyone else was having problems with metabase on the default EB configuration. I’ve been using it for the past week and it is not running very well. Sometimes it takes 10 seconds to load the login screen or my questions, which is weird since I am not making any queries. However when I monitor the environment’s CPU and latency, everything seems normal, so I am not sure what is the real problem here.